Journal of Arabic and Islamic
Studies
IBN FA®DL£AN AND THE R£USIYYAH*
Cambridge
[ABSTRACT:] Ibn
Fadl¢an's account of the caliphal embassy from Baghdad to the King of the Volga
Bulgh¢ars in the early fourth/tenth century is one of our principal, textual
sources for the history, ethnogenesis and polity formation of a number of
tribes and peoples who populated Inner Asia. Of especial significance is his
description of a people whom he calls the R¢usiyyah. Attempts to identify this
people have been the stuff of controversy for almost two centuries and have
largely focused on how this description can be made to contribute to the
Normanist Controversy (the principal, but by no means the only, controversy
concerns the extent of Viking involvement in the creation of Russia). This
article provides a fresh, annotated translation of Ibn Fadl¢an's passage and
considers a multiplicity of identities for the R¢usiyyah.
Ibn Fadl¢an’s account of his
participation in the deputation sent by the Caliph al-Muqtadir in the year 921
A.D. to the King of the Bulgh¢ars of the Volga, in response to his request for
help, has proved to be an invaluable source of information for modern scholars
interested in, among other subjects, the birth and formation of the Russian
state, in the Viking involvement in northern and eastern Europe, in the Slavs
and the Khazars. It has been analyzed and commented upon frequently and forms
the substance of many observations on the study of the ethnography and
sociology of the peoples concerned. Yet it is no exaggeration to say that, with
a few very conspicuous exceptions, the majority of the scholars who refer to
it, who base their observations upon it and who argue from it, are at best
improperly familiar with classical Arabic. In the case of the people known as
the R¢usiyyah, for example, two modern commentators have surveyed Ibn Fadl¢an’s
Kit¢ab, or a portion of it, and have all too hastily identified the R¢us,
variously, as the Vikings[1] and the
Russians,[2] a
scholarly commonplace among those involved [2] in the Normanist debate. Both authors
give the impression that they are blissfully unaware that their identifications
may be contentious or that the R¢us have now been the subject of heated debate
for more than one and a half centuries, though in later years the balance has
swung in favour of the Normanists. Pavel Dolukhanov, however, a leading
authority on the archaeology of the period, in his The Early Slavs: Eastern
Europe from the Initial Settlement to the Kievan Rus, Harlow, 1996, is the
most sophisticated and persuasive exponent of an essentially anti-Normanist,
pro-Slav stance. There are numerous translations of the work into European
languages.[3]
It is the
nature of the accuracy of Ibn Fadl¢an’s report which interests me in this
study. I shall concentrate on a test case: the section of the Kit¢ab devoted
to the R¢usiyyah. My interest in this passage was occasioned by the three and a
half years which I spent as Senior Lecturer in Arabic at the University [3] of Oslo,
where, among scholars interested in the Vikings, as indeed among scholars
generally, it is widely assumed that the R¢us were Scandinavians of eastern
Swedish origin and where there are those who cast aspersions upon Ibn Fadl¢an’s
veracity as an observer.[4] In a
companion piece I have attempted to set the Kit¢ab, and this section in
particular, within a wider textual context.[5] Ibn
Fadl¢an’s cultural chauvinism does not, however, in my opinion, necessitate a
total rejection of his veridicality.
The translation and commentary of the
following passage benefited from the observations of Kjellfrid Nome and Ulla
Stang Dahl, students in the Arabic Storfag at Oslo (1995), with whom I read the
work.
I am not convinced that by
R¢us/R¢usiyyah our text means either the Vikings or the Russians specifically.
I am neither a Normanist nor an anti-Normanist. The Arabic sources in general quite
simply do not afford us enough clarity. The tendency among scholars is to
presume that different Arab authors mean the same thing when they apply the
names R¢us or Maj¢us to the people they describe.[6] After a
perusal of the sources, this strikes me as a perilous presumption. It is a
distinct possibility that the medieval Arabs themselves were perplexed as to
the exact identity of the R¢us, confusing, say, two different peoples.[7] This,
indeed, is the conclusion which Mel’nikova and Petruchkin (as reported by
Dolukhanov, 190) draw, arguing that:
Arab writers who often used the word ‘ar-rus’ never attached to it any
ethnic significance. They viewed the ‘ar-rus’ as warriors and merchants
regardless of their ethnic [4] affiliation. The
same applies to Byzantine sources, which often mentioned ‘people calling
themselves the Ross’ (Rhos), who in reality were groups of Scandinavians
accomplishing various missions.
Although Mel’nikova and Petruchkin seem
both to have their cake and to eat it (by evaluating unequally both sets of
linguistic evidence—consistency on the part of the Greeks, inconsistency on the
part of the Arabs), their assessment of the Arab sources is judicious. Each
reference ought to be evaluated on its own merits. To avoid prejudicing the
issue, I have therefore retained the transliterated form R¢us and R¢usiyyah and
have generally referred to peoples and places in accordance with Ibn Fadl¢an’s
own usage.
In 1970 I. P. …Saskol’skij, in a survey
of modern trends within the Normanist problem (“Recent Developments in the
Normanist Controversy,” in Varangian Problems, Scando Slavica Supplementum 1
[Copenhagen 1970, 21–38], hereafter VP), called for a reassessment and
thorough scrutiny of “the Oriental (Arabic and Persian) sources on the history
of ancient Rus’” (31). This is now available in Golden’s thorough article in
the Encyclopaedia of Islam referred to above (n. 3). Golden (621)
concludes the section on “The Origins of the R¢us” as follows:
The evidence is highly circumstantial at best. Given the complexities of
their conjectured origins, it may, nonetheless, not be amiss to view the R¢us
at this stage of their development, as they began to penetrate Eastern Europe,
not as an ethnos, in the strict sense of the term, for this could shift as new
ethnic elements were added, but rather as a commercial and political
organisation. The term was certainly associated with maritime and riverine
traders and merchant-mercenaries/pirates of “Sak¢aliba” stock (Northern and
Eastern European, Scandinavian, Slavic and Finnic).
Dolukhanov (197) characterizes the
Kievan Rus’ as “a loose confederation of regional arenas of power with strong
separatist trends”. In a time of such manifest change and lack of imposition of
cultural uniformity, it would be unwise to look for unanimous consistency among
the R¢us, each group of whom may have represented a variable level of ethnic
assimilation. These are cautious appraisals[8] according
to which the R¢us appear as a more fluid social unit than recent scholarship has
hitherto, often with its interests firmly vested in nationalist concerns, been
willing to acknowledge. The R¢usiyyah in the passage which follows are a fine
example of ethnic/social fluidity, [5] combining, as Ibn Fadl¢an portrays them
(assuming, of course, that he has not himself confused two distinct peoples,
either with or without the ethnonym R¢us), both essentially Varangian
(costumary, among others) and Khazarian (regal) ethnic traits.[9] It is
quintessentially this fluidity that must be determined.
TRANSLATION
I saw the R¢usiyyah when they had
arrived on their trading expedition[10] and had
disembarked at the River £Atil.[11] I have
never seen more perfect physiques than theirs—they are like palm trees,[12] are fair
and reddish,[13] and do not
wear the qurçtaq or the caftan. The man wears a cloak with which he
covers one half of his body, leaving one of his arms uncovered.[14] Every one
of [6] them
carries an axe,[15] a sword
and a dagger[16] and is
never without all of that which we have mentioned. Their swords are of the
Frankish variety, with broad, ridged blades.[17] Each man,
from the tip of his toes to his neck, is covered in dark-green lines,[18] pictures
and such like. Each woman has, on her breast, a small disc, tied <around her
neck>, made of either iron, silver, copper or gold, in relation to her
husband’s financial and social worth. Each disc has a ring to which a dagger is
attached, also lying on her breast.[19] Around [7] their necks
they wear bands of gold and silver.[20] Whenever a
man’s wealth reaches ten thousand dirhams, he has a band made for his wife; if
it reaches twenty thousand dirhams, he has two bands made for her—for every ten
thousand more, he gives another band to his wife. Sometimes one woman may wear
many bands around her neck. The jewellery which they prize the most is the
dark-green ceramic beads which they have aboard their boats[21] and which
they value very highly: they purchase beads for a dirham a piece and string
them together as necklaces for their wives.[22]
They are the filthiest of all All¢ah’s
creatures: they do not clean themselves after excreting or urinating or wash
themselves when in a state of ritual impurity (i.e., after coitus) and do not
<even> wash their hands after food.[23] [8] Indeed they
are like asses that roam <in the fields>.
They arrive from their territory (min
baladi-him) and moor their boats by the £Atil (a large river), building on
its banks large wooden houses.[24] They [9] gather in
the one house in their tens and twenties, sometimes more, sometimes less. Each
of them has a couch on which he sits. They are accompanied by beautiful slave
girls for trading. One man will have intercourse with his slave-girl while his
companion looks on. Sometimes a group of them comes together to do this, each
in front of the other. Sometimes indeed the merchant will come in to buy a
slave-girl from one of them and he will chance upon him having intercourse with
her, but <the R¢us> will not leave her alone until he has satisfied his
urge. They cannot, of course, avoid washing their faces and their heads each
day, which they do with the filthiest and most polluted water imaginable. I
shall explain. Every day the slave-girl arrives in the morning with a large
basin containing water, which she hands to her owner. He washes his hands and
his face and his hair in the water, then he dips his comb in the water and
brushes his hair, blows his nose and spits in the basin. There is no filthy
impurity which he will not do in this water. When he no longer requires it, the
slave-girl takes the basin to the man beside him and he goes through the same
routine as his friend. She continues to carry it from one man to the next until
she has gone round everyone in the house, with each of them blowing his nose
and spitting, washing his face and hair in the basin.[25]
The moment their boats reach this dock[26] every one
of them disembarks, carrying bread, meat, onions, milk and alcohol (nab³dh),[27] and goes
to a tall piece of wood set up <in the ground>. This piece of wood has a
face like the face of a man and is surrounded by small figurines behind which
are long [10] pieces of
wood set up in the ground.[28]
<When> he reaches the large figure, he prostrates himself before it and
says, “Lord, I have come from a distant land, bringing so many slave-girls
<priced at> such and such per head and so many sables <priced at>
such and such per pelt.”[29] He
continues until he has mentioned all of the merchandise he has brought with
him, then says, “And I have brought this offering,” leaving what he has brought
with him in front of the piece of wood, saying, “I wish you to provide me with
a merchant who has many d³n¢ars and dirhams[30] and who
will buy from me whatever I want <to sell> without haggling over the
price I fix.”[31] Then he
departs. If he has difficulty in selling <his goods> and he has to remain
too many days, he returns with a second and third offering. If his wishes prove
to be impossible he brings an offering to every single one of those figurines
and seeks its intercession, saying, “These are the wives, daughters and sons of
our Lord.”[32] He goes up
to each figurine in turn and questions it, begging its [11] intercession
and grovelling before it. Sometimes business is good and he makes a quick sell,
at
which point he will say, “My Lord has satisfied my request, so I am required to
recompense him.” He procures a number of sheep or cows and slaughters them,
donating a portion of the meat to charity[33] and taking
the rest and casting it before the large piece of wood and the small ones
around it. He ties the heads of the cows or the sheep to that piece of wood set
up in the ground.[34] At night,
the dogs come and eat it all, but the man who has done all this will say, “My
Lord is pleased with me and has eaten my offering.”[35]
When one of them falls ill, they erect
a tent away from them and cast him into it, giving him some bread and water.
They do not come near him or speak to him, indeed they have no contact with him
for the duration of his illness, especially if he is socially inferior or is a
slave. If he recovers and gets back to his feet, he rejoins them. If he dies,
they bury him, though if he was a slave they leave him there as food for the
dogs and the birds.[36] [12]
If they catch a thief or a bandit, they
bring him to a large tree and tie a strong rope around his neck. They tie it to
the tree and leave him hanging there until <the rope>[37] breaks,
<rotted away> by exposure to the rain and the wind.[38]
I was told that when their chieftains
die, the least they do is to cremate them.[39] I was very
keen to verify this, when I learned of the death of one of [13] their great
men. They placed him in his grave (qabr) and erected a canopy[40] over it
for ten days, until they had finished making and sewing his <funeral
garments>.[41] [14]
In the case of a poor man[42] they build
a small boat, place him inside and burn it. In the case of a rich man, they
gather together his possessions and divide them into three, one third for his
family, one third to use for <his funeral> garments,[43] and one
third with which they purchase[44] alcohol
which they drink on the day when his slave-girl kills herself[45] and is
cremated together with her master.[46] (They are
addicted to alcohol, which they drink night and day. Sometimes one of them dies
with the cup still in his hand.)[47]
When their chieftain dies, his family
ask his slave-girls and slave-boys, “Who among you will die with him?” and some
of them reply, “I shall.” Having said this, it becomes incumbent upon the
person and it is impossible ever to turn back. Should that person try to, he is
not permitted to do so. It is usually slave-girls who make this offer.
When that man whom I mentioned earlier
died, they said to his slave-girls, “Who will die with him?” and one of them
said, “I shall.” So they placed
[15] two slave-girls[48] in charge
of her to take care of her and accompany her wherever she went, even to the
point of occasionally washing her feet with their own hands. They set about
attending to the dead man, preparing his clothes for him and setting right all
he needed. Every day the slave-girl would drink <alcohol> and would sing
merrily and cheerfully.[49]
On the day when he and the slave-girl
were to be burned I arrived at the river where his ship was. To my surprise I
discovered that it had been beached and that four planks of birch (khadank)
and other types of wood had been erected for it. Around them wood had been
placed in such a way as to resemble scaffolding (an¢ab³r).[50] Then the
ship was hauled and placed on top of this wood.[51] They
advanced, going to and fro <around the boat> uttering words which I did
not understand, while he was still in his grave and had not been exhumed.
Then they produced a couch and placed
it on the ship, covering it with quilts <made of> Byzantine silk brocade
and cushions <made of> Byzantine silk brocade. Then a crone arrived whom
they called the “Angel of Death” and she spread on the couch the coverings we
have mentioned. She is responsible for having his <garments> sewn up and
putting him in order[52] and it is she
who kills the slave-girls. I myself saw her: a gloomy, corpulent woman, neither
young nor old.[53]
When they came to his grave, they
removed the soil from the wood and then removed the wood, exhuming him
<still dressed> in the iz¢ar in which [16] he had died.
I could see that he had turned black because of the coldness of the ground.
They had also placed alcohol, fruit and a pandora (çtunb¢ur)[54] beside him
in the grave, all of which they took out. Surprisingly, he had not begun to
stink and only his colour had deteriorated. They clothed him in trousers,
leggings (r¢an), boots, a qurçtaq, and a silk caftan with golden
buttons,[55] and placed
a silk qalansuwwah <fringed> with sable on his head. They carried
him inside the pavilion[56] on the
ship and laid him to rest on the quilt, propping him with cushions. Then they
brought alcohol, fruit and herbs (rayh¢an)[57] and placed
them beside him. Next they brought bread, meat and onions, which they cast in
front of him, a dog, which they cut in two and which they threw onto the ship,
and all of his weaponry, which they placed beside him. They then brought two
mounts, made them gallop until they began to sweat, cut them up into pieces and
threw the flesh onto the ship.[58] They next
fetched two cows, which they also cut up into pieces and threw on board, and a
cock and a hen, which they slaughtered and cast onto it.[59] [17]
Meanwhile, the slave-girl who wished to
be killed was coming and going, entering one pavilion after another. The owner of
the pavilion would have intercourse with her and say to her, “Tell your master
that I have done this purely out of love for you.”
At the time of the evening prayer on
Friday they brought the slave-girl to a thing that they had constructed, like a
door-frame. She placed her feet on the hands of the men and was raised above
that door-frame. She said something and they brought her down. Then they lifted
her up a second time and she did what she had done the first time. They brought
her down and then lifted her up a third time and she did what she had done on
the first two occasions. They next handed her a hen. She cut off its head and
threw it away. They took the hen and threw it on board the ship.[60] [18]
I quizzed the interpreter about her actions and he said, “The first time
they lifted her, she said, ‘Behold, I see my father and my mother.’ The second
time she said, ‘Behold, I see all of my dead kindred, seated.’ The third time
she said, ‘Behold, I see my master, seated in Paradise. Paradise is beautiful and
verdant. He is accompanied by his men and his male-slaves. He summons me, so
bring me to him.’”[61] So they brought her to the ship and she removed two bracelets that she
was wearing, handing them to the woman called the “Angel of Death,” the one who
was to kill her. She also removed two anklets that she was wearing, handing
them to the two slave-girls who had waited upon her: they were the daughters of
the crone known as the “Angel of Death.” Then they lifted her onto the ship but
did not bring her into the pavilion. The men came with their shields and sticks
and handed her a cup of alcohol over which she chanted and then drank. The
interpreter said to me, “Thereby she bids her female companions farewell.” She
was handed another cup, which she
[19] took and chanted for a long
time, while the crone urged her to drink it and to enter the pavilion in which
her master lay.[62] I saw that she was befuddled and wanted to enter the pavilion but she
had <only> put her head into the pavilion <while her body remained outside
it>.[63] The crone grabbed hold of her head and dragged her into the pavilion,
entering it at the same time. The men began to bang their shields with the
sticks so that her screams could not be heard and so terrify the other
slave-girls, who would not, then, seek to die with their masters.[64]
Six men entered the pavilion and all had intercourse with the
slave-girl.[65] They laid her down beside her master and two of them took hold of her
feet, two her hands. The crone called the “Angel of Death” placed a rope around
her neck in such a way that the ends crossed one another (mukh¢alafan)
and handed it to two <of the men> to pull on it. She advanced with a
broad-bladed dagger and began to thrust it in and out between her ribs, now
here, now there, while the two men throttled her with the rope until she died.[66] [20]
Then the deceased’s next of kin approached and took
hold of a piece of wood and set fire to it. He walked backwards, with the back
of his neck to the ship, his face to the people, with the lighted piece of wood
in one hand and the other hand on his anus, being completely naked.[67] He ignited
the wood that had been set up under the ship after they had placed the
slave-girl whom they had killed beside her master. Then the people came forward
with sticks and firewood. Each one carried a stick the end of
which he had set fire to and which he threw on top of the wood. The wood
caught fire, and then the ship, the pavilion, the man, the slave-girl and all
it contained. A dreadful wind arose and the flames leapt higher and blazed
fiercely.
One of the R¢usiyyah stood beside me and I heard
him speaking to my interpreter. I quizzed him about what he had said, and he
replied, “He said, ‘You Arabs are a foolish lot!’” So I said, “Why is that?”
and he replied, “Because you purposely take those who are dearest to you and
whom you hold in highest esteem and throw them under the earth, where they are
eaten by the earth, by vermin and by worms, whereas we burn them in the fire
there and then, so that they enter Paradise immediately.” Then he laughed loud
and long. I quizzed him about that <i.e., the entry into Paradise> and he
said, “Because of the love which my Lord feels for him. He has sent the wind to
take him away within an hour.”[68] Actually, [21] it took scarcely
an hour for the ship, the firewood, the slave-girl and her master to be burnt
to a fine ash.
They built something like a round hillock over the
ship, which they had pulled out of the water, and placed in the middle of it a
large piece of birch (khadank) on which they wrote the name of the man
and the name of the King of the R¢us. Then they left.[69]
He
(Ibn Fadl¢an) said: One of the customs of the King of the R¢us is that in his
palace he keeps company with four hundred of his bravest and most trusted companions;
they die when he dies and they offer their lives to protect him.[70] Each of them has a slave-girl who
waits on him, washes his head and prepares his food and drink, and another with
whom he has coitus. These four hundred <men> sit below his throne, which
is huge and is studded with precious stones. On his throne there sit forty
slave-girls who belong to his bed. Sometimes he has coitus with one of them in
the presence of those companions whom we have mentioned. He does not come down
from his throne. When he wants to satisfy an urge, he satisfies it in a salver.
When he wants to ride, they bring his beast up to the [22] throne, whence he mounts it, and when
he wants to dismount, he brings his beast <up to the throne> so that he
can dismount there. He has a vicegerent who leads the army, fights against the
enemy and stands in for him among his subjects.[71]
****************
Foote and Wilson (408 and 411) make the
following comment:
Ibn Fadlan . . . writes as an eyewitness, and although there is no reason
to doubt his general accuracy, we must bear a number of factors in mind before
generalizing on the basis of his account. It is the funeral of a rich and
important man; it is a funeral by cremation; it took place in Russia (and many
Russian scholars do not accept it as a description of a Scandinavian ceremony),
where the Norsemen had been subject to foreign influence, perhaps especially
from the Volga Turks; finally, some things in the account can only have been
obtained by Ibn Fadlan through an interpreter. . . . Striking elements in this
description, such as the ‘Angel of Death,’ the ritual intercourse, and the wary
and naked kindler of the pyre, cannot be paralleled in Norse sources, and other
items—the ‘door-frame’ object and the vision of paradise ‘beautiful and
green’—are too vague to provide secure links. These things can be neither
accepted nor rejected as widespread features of Norse burial rites, but there
remain a good many other details that are reflected in our archaeological and [23] literary sources.[72]
As for the identity of the people
called R¢us in this account, there are a number of possibilities:
(i) they are Scandinavians, in
particular the eastern Swedish tribe known by this name: a group of elite
merchant-pirates operating out of Ladoga and Rîrik’s Hill-Fort;
(ii) they are an autochthonous people,
the ethnic group known as the Rus’ who took their name from the river Ros’;
(iii) the account represents a
conflation of at least two distinct ethnic groups, of eastern (Slavic) and
northern (Scandinavian) provenance known to the Arabs indistinguishably as R¢us
and influenced by ideas about the people known as the Maj¢us and the
Saq¢alibah;
(iv) the people described are a people
in the process of ethnic, social and cultural adaptation and assimilation—the
process whereby the Scandinavian R¢us became the Slavic Rus’, having been
exposed to the influence of the Volga Bulgh¢ars and the Khazars;
(v) Ibn Fadl¢an has mistakenly
identified a group of Kievan chieftains on an expedition to extort tribute from
the Slavs (usually in the form of marten furs) as merchant-warriors on a
trading mission, basing his interpretation on his acquaintance with the R¢us as
merchants;
(vi) it is erroneous to think of an
ethnos with a distinct identity, as opposed to a multi-ethnic confederation
based on common economic and political objectives (Golden’s solution, given
above), which confederation would have been subject to a preponderant
Scandinavian influence;
(vii) the textual history of the Kit¢ab,
taken in conjunction with the religious prejudice of the author (as evinced in
the depiction of R¢us sexual customs and the Islamicization of Valhalla), is
too problematical to permit any conclusions to be drawn from the work.
I hold that we are here given a picture
of a people in the process of ethnic, social and cultural adaptation,
assimilation and absorption, one typical of “the chameleon-like character of
the Viking abroad, adapting himself to his surroundings where he saw something
he thought was good; merely imposing his economic and administrative will on an
area” (Wilson, VP, 111).[73] [24] This would
account for the absence of any signs of cultural impact left by the Varangians,
in the form of toponyms, nomenclature, and linguistic calques (see Dolukhanov,
190, and Logan, 203). As Dolukhanov (195) put it:
The Varangians were rapidly incorporated into the Slav
‚elite, acquiring Slavic names, language and habits, and losing the remains of
their Scandinavian identity.
To corroborate this point, I would like
to refer to Martin Carver’s recent theories concerning the composite (the word
he uses is “poetic”) nature of the burial at Sutton Hoo, a ceremonial
performance which was expressive of the political, cultural and religious
aspirations of Anglo-Saxon England, a declaration of regal alignment with pagan
Scandinavia and rejection of Christian Kent.[74] We can no
longer countenance those arguments which interpret the burial as a fixed,
immutable event, for such contentions, by positing the burial ceremony as
static and unchangeable, consider it determinative of ethnos rather than
vice-versa.
Ibn Fadl¢an’s traders are the
mercantile warrior elite who placed themselves firmly at the top of the Slavic
social scale, and his picture attests to the fluidity of the process of cultural
and racial intermingling, a fluidity which many commentators, with an agenda
very decidedly their own, have wished to neglect, curtail or abandon:
The
principal historical question is not whether the Rus were Scandinavians or
Slavs, but, rather, how quickly these Scandinavian Rus became absorbed into
Slavic life and culture. . . . In 839 the Rus were Swedes; in 1043 the Rus were
Slavs. Sometime between 839 and 1043 two changes took place: one was the
absorption of the Swedish Rus into the Slavic people among whom they settled,
and the second was the extension of the term ‘Rus’ to apply to these Slavic
peoples by whom the Swedes were absorbed. (Logan, 203)
Ibn Fadl¢an’s account sheds valuable
light on the celerity of this process of assimilation and absorption, which was
accomplished in the space of two centuries.[75]
The preceding discussion has been
largely, though not exclusively, philological, [25] focussed on
a process of historical identification. There are, of course, other riches in
Ibn Fadl¢an’s text. His observations on the importance of slaves in the R¢us
world, as chattels and items of trade, suggest, in the context of master-slave
relations depicted in the text, the reasons for the celerity of the process of
cultural assimilation, from Viking to Slav. Ibn Fadl¢an is himself fascinated
by the artefacts of the R¢us; their trimetalism, clothing, domestic
arrangements and the textiles which constituted the funerary pomp of the dead
chieftain. He also provides useful observations on the (un)suitability of the
R¢us as potential members of the Islamic polity, and stresses their very
distinct alterity to a Muslim audience.
Perhaps, from an exclusively Arabic
perspective, the most remarkable feature of this account of the R¢us is the
impression it conveys of being essentially detached, indeed its almost
scientific character, eschewing, by and large, the improbable, and blatantly
fictitious, blemishes which loom all too large in the majority of the accounts
of foreigners and foreign lands found in Arabic geographical and travel works.[76] It is a
consciously restrained narrative, which does not balk at the opportunity to
point to the cultural and religious superiority of Islam, but which is not
drawn by this impulse into wildly extravagant tales, which often pruriently
dwell on sexual improprieties. The account is not, with minor exceptions, a
fusion of tall tales appropriate to a male assembly,[77] the
audience which proved very influential in shaping so much of the Arabic
narrative style in the classical period, but is passably ‘ethnographic’
observation, generally divested of rhetorical filigree and of the propensity
for risqu‚e elaboration and the fantastic. The atmosphere of the all-male majlis,
the salon, with its entertaining anecdotes and ribald improprieties, is
lacking. Avoidance of such an atmosphere obtains throughout the Kit¢ab.
